1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer networks and more particularly to a method and an apparatus for migrating a network connection to follow an application that is moved from one computing node to another within a centralized computing system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Presently, users purchase dedicated software applications to provide computing resources. However, certain economies of scale should be achievable by making applications available over a network, such as the Internet, so that users need not own their own dedicated copies. Instead, an application could be made centrally available and users would purchase the computing services made available by the application.
One problem with centralizing computer services relates to load balancing. More particularly, centralized computing systems typically include a set of identical machines running in parallel, and to achieve maximum efficiency from such a system it is desirable to have each of the machines equally utilized. Accordingly, when the load on one machine drops and the load on another increases, it is desirable to shift load from the over utilized machine to the less utilized machine. However, this is not easily accomplished when applications on the over utilized machine are actively connected to remote applications, without closing the connections.
Accordingly, what is desired is a method for migrating an application from one machine to another in a centralized computing system while maintaining the connections between the application and remote applications.